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As I'm sure you know by now, Ornette Coleman died yestertoday,
age 85. He was the first jazz musician I developed a real interest
in and affection for. That was in the mid-1970s, at least 15 years
after Coleman made his initial big splash, about the time he was
inventing a second wave of jazz-rock fusion, one much more radical
than the funk-oriented Miles Davis or the prog of John McLaughlin.

Coleman was part of the first wave of jazz avant-gardists, a group
which variously sought to explore and find novel sounds, rhythms, and
harmonics -- to violate the known rules of jazz, to do things that
are wrong and somehow make them sound right. (Mingus put it most
succinctly: "It's like organized disorganization, or playing wrong
right.") Most of that wave wound up contributing to the postmodern
synthesis jazz students today are
taught: what we call postbop. Martin Williams was so impressed with
Coleman that he concluded his Smithsonian Collection of Classic
Jazz with three Coleman pieces (plus a Coltrane), arguing that
[early] Coleman was the endpoint of the classic jazz tradition. Yet
even today most novices find [early] Coleman puzzling before they
are swept away. I saw this at work when my hip-hop-loving nephew
wanted to get acquainted with jazz and I handed him The Shape of
Jazz to Come.

Later Coleman pushed further and harder, but by the time he cut
his last album, 2006's Sound Grammar, all the stars aligned:
no jazz record in the past decade (or really, ever -- and I've been
involved in a lot of critic polling on such things) has been so
universally exclaimed. It even won the Pulitzer Prize that had so
notoriously been denied Duke Ellington. Yet it sounded so offhand
you could imagine him knocking sequels out every year -- so it seems
odd that it came ten years after his previous album, and nine years
before his death. He had remained active well into last year --
playing at a tribute concert in his honor in Brooklyn (and suing
to keep the ablum from being released). He never got comfortable
with the record business as he hopped from label to label, taking
long breaks, never settling in -- he didn't even seem to be happy
with his own labels, going back to Artist House in the late 1970s.
One imagines he has hoards of tapes that greedy heirs will eventually
dump onto the market. Or respectful ones, given that his son Denardo
has been his preferred drummer ever since puberty in the 1970s.
(Denardo first played on an album in 1966 when he was 10, but it
took him a while to finally push Ed Blackwell, Billy Higgins, and
Shannon Jackson out of the picture.)

I expect many more live albums will appear in the future, especially as
his estate swings into action, and as Europe's 50-year copyright limit
legitimizes more bootlegs.

An informal scan indicates that at least 500 albums have Ornette
Coleman compositions on them (maybe more than 600; I couldn't check,
but "Lonely Woman" is undoubtedly the song leader). I'd hazard a wild
guess that two dozen or more albums are tributes/dedicated to Ornette
Coleman: most obviously, everything by Old and New Dreams (Don Cherry,
Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell -- note that Coleman outlived
all the members of his ghost band); also (hard to check this precisely):
Affinity [Joe Rosenberg], Borah Bergman, Paul Bley, Charlie Haden, Dave
Liebman, Pat Metheny, Paul Motian, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, John Zorn.

Ornette Coleman was one of the few jazz musicians Robert Christgau
continued to review regularly. His own Consumer Guide reviews are
here.
This reminds me that the first time I heard Dancing in Your Head
was when Bob played it for me. The symphony theme was the most
deliriously joyful piece of music I had ever heard. That wasn't
the first time I heard Coleman, but it pushed my interest to a
higher level.